Wireless/Mobile /

LAN standards landscape shifts

By Joanie Wexler
Network World Wireless Newsletter, 04/04/01

The positioning of 802.11 and HomeRF wireless LAN standards has always been a bit confusing, and Intel's recent departure from the emerging 10M bit/sec HomeRF market has put yet another twist on the standards situation.

Basically, 802.11 has been touted as the enterprise standard, while HomeRF, as its name implies, has been targeted at home users. However, when pressed, representatives from each technology camp have always hedged their bets across both markets, not wanting to lose sales by allying themselves too sharply with one set of customers, given that the capabilities do overlap to a degree.

And as the demarcation lines between business and home blur, standards fragmentation poses an interoperability quagmire for users who want to use the same technology when working at the office or at home. This is one reason that Intel indicated it would support a single high-speed standard in volume. Some observers predict that Intel's decision to support only 802.11 standards going forward might be the death knell for HomeRF.

Here is a summary of how the two technologies have compared:

* HomeRF has had some catching up to do with the currently implemented IEEE technology, 802.11b, in terms of speed. Current implementations of HomeRF run at 1.6M bit/sec and next-generation, 10M bit/sec HomeRF LANs are expected to start shipping from companies such as Proxim in the second half of this year to rival 802.11b's 11M bit/sec speeds. Intel says it plans to continue shipping its 1.6M bit/sec AnyPoint wireless LAN, based on HomeRF technology, but that the next generation of AnyPoint for home users will support the 11M bit/sec 802.11b standard instead of the higher-speed HomeRF version.

* 802.11 has had some catching up to do with HomeRF in terms of quality of service for integrating voice support and multimedia onto the networks. HomeRF supports voice through the reservation of 100K bit/sec time slots, so that voice traffic never has to fight for bandwidth and thus gets the QoS it requires. The IEEE 802.11 group is still working to build QoS into its set of standards via an extension to 802.11b called 802.11e, but word on the availability of the capabilities has been vague.

* Since users do not require the management and authentication that is a staple on enterprise requests-for-proposal, these capabilities have been usually left out of HomeRF equipment. HomeRF LANs, then have been less expensive and more palatable to the price-sensitive consumer market - and in some cases, to the crossover small office/home office and telecommuting markets.